I feel amazed when I watch a marathon race, where a runner who has led the pack for much of the race, loses out to either numbers two, three or four in the last lap, to win the race. This also happens in car races like F1 and with teams who dominate much of the game in football and hockey, where the opponent shoots the winning goal and wins.

I once read -  "The person who discovered electricity did not make the money,  it was the person who discovered how he could distribute electricity who became prosperous!"  There is the case of Abraham Gesnez, a physician by profession, who had a passion for coal geology while experimenting with coal tar; he devised a way to distil it into a combustible liquid he called, ‘kerosene'.  Kerosene burned beautifully and gave light as strong and steady as that of whale oil (used earlier for illumination) but with the potential for kerosene to be produced much more economically.  Then came a man named, George Bisell, a former superintendent of schools who saw the potential and formed the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company and began drilling in Western Pennsylvania. When others saw how easy it was to extract oil and turn it into kerosene, a ‘land rush' was on.

Others produced bigger volumes than the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.  Land prices dropped with the oil prices, from $10-00 a barrel in January l861 to just l0 cents a barrel by December 1861. Most got out of the business. But a small firm in Cleveland, Clark and Rockefeller, which dealt in other farm commodities, decided to move in. They bought much of the land at throw-away prices. And not surprisingly, soon, John D Rockefeller controlled about 90 per cent of the American oil business.

His virtual monopoly allowed him to keep prices stable and grow fantastically rich in the process.  By l900, his personal wealth was increasing by about $1 billion a year, measured in today's money.  No human being in modern times has been richer! He won, although he was a ‘Johnny come lately'.

In l846, a man called Frederick Holmes patented an electric arc lamp. He followed a technique used by Humphry Davy, 40 years earlier, which Davy had not capitalised on. In the l840's, a young pharmacist in Newcastle, UK, Joseph Swan, made some successful experiments to take this further in the field of illumination.  In l870's, Herman Sprengel, a German chemist working in London, developed what came to be called the ‘Sprengel Mercury pump', a crucial invention that made household illumination possible. But it stopped there. It was only in l879 that Thomas Edison, who had started his quest in l877, could invite a select audience to come and witness a demonstration of his new incandescent lights. Although Swan also gave a public display in l879 in Newcastle, Edison was far more prominent and therefore more lastingly significant. The invention of the light bulb was a wonderful thing but of not much practical use, when there was no socket to plug it into! Edison organised the distribution of electricity.

Time and again, throughout the course of history, we have witnessed that the leader of the pack need not be the ultimate winner! You can be number two, three or even four and still have the chance to be the ultimate winner. But you must make it happen.

The author, Walter Vieira is a senior management consultant

The views expressed in this column are that of the author only